Brown v Board

 

In 1896, the Supreme Court ruled in Plessy v. Ferguson that racially segregated public facilities were legal, so long as the facilities for blacks and whites were equal.

The ruling constitutionally sanctioned laws barring African Americans from sharing the same buses, schools, and other public facilities as whites—known as “Jim Crow” laws—and established the “separate but equal” doctrine that would stand for the next six decades.

But by the early 1950s, the NAACP was working hard to challenge segregation laws in public schools and had filed lawsuits on behalf of plaintiffs in states such as South Carolina, Virginia, and Delaware.

 Linda Brown was denied entrance to Topeka’s all-white elementary schools. In his lawsuit, Brown claimed that schools for black children were not equal to the white schools and that segregation violated the so-called “equal protection clause” of the 14th Amendment, which holds that no state can “deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”

Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka became a landmark case in  1954  in which the justices ruled unanimously that racial segregation of children in public schools was unconstitutional, ultimately reversing the Plessy v Fergurson. Brown v. Board of Education was one of the cornerstones of the civil rights movement and helped establish the precedent that “separate-but-equal” education and other services were not, in fact, equal at all.